"Each step forward has a sacred meaning of its own"   Sri Chinmoy

Czechman Middle-Distance Triathlon - June 1st 2024 - Pardubice, Czech Republic

I love a first-time experience, so when I was invited to travel abroad to join a Sri Chinmoy team for a Triathlon, I jumped at the chance to be a part of it and race a Tri outside the UK for the first time in my life. As so often happens though, as the date got close, things got more challenging. Most of the entrants had to drop out for medical/fitness/other reasons and that left only 5 of us - then there was the hassle of arranging transport with a bike (I'd not realised what a logistical challenge that would be) and finally the weather took a turn for the worse. Like most brits, I instinctively expect good weather every time I leave these shores, it is somehow in our DNA that we have more rain than everywhere else and the sun shines on the rest of the world. Newsflash - it rains in Czech too!

Kokila saved me from a transport nightmare by giving me a lift to the airport for my stupidly early flight out of Heathrow (too early for a train, and the coaches won't take a bike, even when boxed up). At the other end, the wonderful Viharin picked me up from the airport in Prague, took me for breakfast then got me and the bike safely on the train to Pardubice. The train was cheap and excellent and with only a minimal extra ticket required for Red Bike. An hour later, serious age-group triathlete Amur from Bosnia met me on the platform and we spent a while unpacking and repacking his car to accommodate both bikes and all our kit. Later we were joined by chief supporter Udayachal from Zlin and the 3-strong Relay Team from Slovakia. An indian meal in Pardubice was our pre-race prep, we were also able to get a reliability ride in to make sure we'd got our bikes reassembled and set up correctly. The start was not until 12 the next day so that left us with probably too much time for pre-race nerves!

The morning of June 1st, the first day of summer, dawned with the promise of rain and that promise was soon kept. We arrived at Car Park B and walked a mile or so in to the race venue then pretty soon got into full wetsuits as it was chilly and the rain was pretty relentless. I was nervous about the race, having been preoccupied with my own event organisation and recovering from the 7-hour walk for most of the time when I should have been preparing for this challenge - at least I had manage 3 weeks of pretty solid training but that is not a lot for a Half-Ironman. I was relying, once again, on background fitness and go-for-it on the day. With a previous best of 5:21 and worst of 6:03 I was hoping for something under 5:30 given the conditions - looking around I could see it was a young crowd compared to UK Triathlons and all on very serious bikes - on my 15 year old entry-level Tri Bike with 5cm section on the wheels and a not-very-flat riding position I was a little outclassed. Certainly out-biked. There was a lot of faffing to do with the Clean Transition, as it involved zero gear alongside the bike (not even helmet) and everything to be stashed in bags, hung on pegs in a kind of pre-transition area that reminded me of a school cloakroom. Low wooden benches like school "forms" were lined up opposite a panel with 2 pegs - your Run Bag on the upper one and Bike Bag lower down. I sorted things as best I could and memorised my spot at peg 42 so I could find it quickly. Then it was a case of shivering in the rain with goggles on (so I could see - glasses now stashed in transition) for the fully Czech-language race briefing. Amur gave me a little translation - he lived in Czech for years and is fluent, fortunately!

Next came a chilly wait for the start - I didn't bother with much of a warm-up swim as I was not in that kind of shape. When the start did come, after a lot of loud ACDC and a boisterous rock DJ whipping up the crowd, I had managed to meditate in the midst of that vortex of noise and chaos and I was feeling ready for the adventure. Immediately 550 swimmers headed out towards a single directional buoy and it was a sea of arms and legs and bubbles. I was tucked in behind a pack that Amur had joined and told me were regulars he knew from other races - they had picked a good spot to start and I was able to draft a little. The water was warm at around 20 C and my goggles were clear and firmly on - everything was going well. It was very much a contact sport as I nipped from one set of feet to draft behind, to another, looking for a pack wherever I could, and rarely if ever swimming with clear water ahead of me. I was swimming at a hard effort but holding back now and again when I reminded myself I was not really tri-fit. Only 2 swims in the lake this year of around 2.2 k each was all the prep I had done, but I felt pretty good nonetheless.

As I came around the second buoy, I broke out of my swim-trance to check my watch and was surprised at how little time had elapsed. I gave it max effort to try and get a PB in the swim, which was a gamble as I didn't fully remember the course and I wasn't 100% sure when I got to the last turn if it really was the cue for a sprint or if there was another leg before another turn. Soon I saw land ahead and my final push got me out of the water and jogging up the ramp in just over 35 minutes - a massive PB for the swim for me. Not bad on so little preparation - must have been the drafting!

Transition took just over 3 minutes and much of that was jogging the fair distance from water to mount line. My old and battle-scarred wetsuit came off easily and didn't fall to bits as I'd feared. The faffing with bags - getting wetstuit into one, sorting shoes/glasses/goggles/nose-clip so as not to lose anything - was not as tricky as I'd expected. Soon I was on the bike and tentatively taking the tight bend on to the out-and-back section that preceded the double loop. 90k of rural Czech roads awaited - a novel experience. The rain and chilly air combined to make life uncomfortable at first, even though I'd wrapped up with a tight jersey (a Czechman one I'd bought the night before, in anticipation of a cold bike leg) and my faithful windstopper gilet, but soon I warmed up OK from the hard effort. I was managing to exceed the target pace of 18mph by a fair margin (that was the speed I'd made it up to in training) but still I was disappointed that the entire field was breezing past me at much higher speeds. Some of that was down to better bikes, and youth, but it was also showing up my lack of trime-trial fitness on the bike. The second wettest year in history back in the UK had kept me off the bike, as had prioritising first an ultra trail marathon and then the 7-hour Walk. Still, I was cruising at 22 mph and slowing to a standstill on the tight corners because of the rain and that was somehow evening out at an average pace of 20mph. Better than anything I had sustained in a race of this length before, that was for sure.

The course was pretty flat and on excellent, smooth roads that put ours in the UK to shame. While not 100% traffic-free, it was near enough. One of the main issues was complying with the strict drafting/overtaking/dropping-back rules and a couple of times I thought I had been caught out being too slow to fall back and leave a 10m gap, when the bike-marshals came by. Fortunately I was doing well enough to stay within the rules and I never got shown a card. The course was lovely, but in the rain I just kept my head down and didn't really notice the scenery. There were a couple of hills, where I moved up several places only to lose them again on the descent or the flat, plus aid stations where we were offered bananas and isotonic drinks. I had my own electrolyte drink and was working my way through mountain-fuel jellies and decathlon carbo-sweets, both of which were easy to get down and seemed to do the trick. The weather cleared and we had first pale grey and then even some patches of blue overhead - and then I noticed how lovely the area was. Gently rolling fields, villages with domed churches, a few patches of forest. It all had a sense of openness and vastness and I was able to appreciate it once the rain had slackened off and got me into joy mode and out of just survival mode.

After two and a half hours I was back on the initial section of the course, heading past the penalty box where a bunch of stocky riders with flash bikes were laughing at their misfortune (possibly relishing the attention) as they waited for the minutes to pass so they could restart. Then we were into the forest, into the small crowds of supporters who were all still clustered around transition, the lake and the run. T2 was again around 3 minutes, I was pretty efficient and only sacrificed a few seconds to get tri-socks on ready for the half marathon run. Out on the course the first thing that struck me was how heavy my legs felt running off-the-bike and how awesome my shoes were at softening the impact and smoothing things out. I started brightly at around 8 minute pace which after that hard bike effort was as good as I was likely to get, then as the first lap (of four) began to unwind I felt the payback of the full-on swim and hard-paced ride and had to dig in to keep going. I was ahead of Marek from the relay team at first, but soon he was easing past me, looking intense and clearly working hard. I began to feel a bit sick from the effort level and soon discarded my bike cap (throwing it to Udayachal) and the gel I had in my hand which I knew I wouldn't be able to take. I reverted to coke at the aid stations and just kept checking my watch so I could force myself to keep up the effort level on the long, straight road - mostly shaded in the deep forest but with patches of sunlight here and there. Up and down we went, the weather getting warmer, the flat, straight road seeming to lengthen with each lap. I managed to hold my own, though my mind was entering into the calculation world, knowing that a PB was within reach if I could just keep up around an 8:30 pace. That sounds so easy but it wasn't, on heavy legs and with my stomach refusing to be fed any decent fuel. The coke helped, the weather never got too hot, and my legs and fitness didn't fail me. After a 1:46 run that mosty felt like the last part of a marathon, I was coming in towards the turnaround for the last time and branching off under an arch to head for the finish line. 5:15, a lifetime PB, and another victory over my younger self.

The intense effort in the run had left me pretty depleted and as a volunteer hung the huge Czechman medal around my neck I had to hold on to a barrier to stay upright. I staggered down the path between 2 tents ahead of me only to find that the refreshments tent was also a beer tent and the massage tent was crowded. The queue for free massage wasn't that long, but the queue for beer certainly was. I couldn't face the chaos in either in the state I was in, so I wondered into medical and grabbed one of the free reclining chairs where people could recover. It took around 15 minutes before I was fit to stand up and haul myself into the refreshment tent to get a slice of cheese and a slice of bread and some coke. That did the trick though and with my blood sugar back up, reunited with Amur, Marek, Pranjal and Petr, I was able to hear how they had got on. Amur, with a PB of 4.41 behind him this season, had suffered in the cold but still nailed 4.59. The relay team were ahead of me too, despite Petr being knocked nearly senseless by a kick in the neck during the melee of the first buoy in the swim.

I was more than happy with my personal result, given the build up and the bike, but I was 325th out of 550 so didn't make it into the top half. Out of the small field of 55-59 men, I was exactly in the middle with 13 ahead of me and 13 behind - that felt like a good result!

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